The present invention relates to managing patron queues through influencing patron behaviors by incentives.
More particularly, elements within pubic attractions, such as amusement park rides, museum items, historical sites, etc., often require queues and other limited access strategies to enable each patron to have a turn at enjoying the attraction. Queue sizes, which may refer to numbers of patrons or time to serve each patron in the queue (i.e., how long the last person in the queue must wait to be served at the front of the queue) may have fluxes and lulls in the numbers of attending patrons, and thus in corresponding long or short wait times. Long wait times are generally undesired, and may result in customer dissatisfaction and corresponding loss of customer participation and revenue.
Venue operators sometimes implement preferential admission policies with respect to some customers, for example in order to enable quicker access to the more popular attractions for such preferred customers in order to increase their satisfaction. However, such techniques generally leave other customers dissatisfied. Further, such preferential admission policies are generally implemented at the time of providing admission status credentials to a customer upon entering a facility, and usually require estimating or extrapolating likely customer wait times in the future from current attendance, weather, past attraction and crowd behavior history, etc. As customer participation and attendance levels may fluctuate during a period that the attraction is available, for example over a day or over a weekend, the efficacy of such policies is limited by the ability to accurately project future attraction demands. Such policies also fail to adjust to new attendance data, for example to react or otherwise recognize that some attractions may become unexpectedly popular, or unexpectedly under utilized, after differentiated credentials have already been issued.